deaf:audist

audist

Audist (race:hearing::racist:audist, Davis 882) culture is itself deaf to its own erasure of the deaf subject position. In my interaction with John, I entered a deafened moment. Yet John was forced to enter this unfamiliar zone with me. He too was forced to communicate with someone who could not (metaphorically) hear him. My advantage was that the majority of those outside this deafened moment could hear and understand me. This is not true for John. He encounters the metaphorical deafened moment far more often than I do, for hearing is the norm. Ethnosemantic research is itself deaf to John and to the meaning-making units of ASL, although some progress is being made toward understanding sign language as an authentic human linguistic medium. ASL is not English by any stretch of the imagination (See Bauman) and yet we treat deaf students as if they simply needed exposure to hearing culture and its auditory literacy.

back | map | next

john in context | jenny & sue
deaf:audist | hearing pedagogy | enfi | techno-teaching
city on the hill | "othered" outside
end | cited